Wage Stagnation

The latest compensation data from the US Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics show that total compensation for US employees has increased modestly over the past year, from $35.28 per hour worked in June 2017 to $36.22 per hour worked in June 2018. Wages and salaries averaged $24.72 per hour worked and accounted for 68.3 percent of these costs, while benefits averaged $11.50 and accounted for 31.7 percent. For private sector employees, compensation has increased from $33.26 per hour worked to $34.19. Wages made up $23.78 or 69.6 percent of that figure, while the remaining $10.41 (30.4 percent) consisted of benefit costs, in which the BLS includes supplemental pay.

While the percentage ratio of wages to benefits was unchanged from June 2017, benefit costs grew at a slightly higher rate than wages year-over-year, nearly 3 percent compared to 2.7 percent. This reflects a nearly 12 percent increase in bonuses and other forms of supplemental pay, from $1.18 per hour to $1.32; supplemental pay made up 3.8 percent of the total compensation mix in June 2018, compared to 3.5 percent a year earlier. Paid leave, including vacation time, also increased slightly.

Taking a longer-term view, over the past five years, benefit costs for private-sector employees have increased by over 20 percent, from $8.64 per hour worked in June 2013; whereas wages and salaries have increased 16 percent, from $20.47 that month. Supplemental pay, by comparison, has increased 65 percent from 80¢ per hour worked in June 2013. This trajectory reflects the increasing tendency we’ve observed among employers in recent years toward variable pay schemes that reward employees for high performance with one-time bonuses rather than standard annual raises.

The US made no progress toward closing the gender pay gap between 2016 and 2017, with the ratio between women’s and men’s average earnings stalling at 80.5 cents to the dollar and the gaps between women of color and white men actually widening, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research reported last week:

If current trends continue, women will not receive equal pay until 2059, according to a related IWPR analysis of trends in earnings since 1960. This projection for equal pay remains unchanged for the last two years, indicating that the rate of progress has stalled.

Women of all major racial and ethnic groups saw the wage gap with White men widen in 2017, with especially large gaps facing Black and Hispanic women. Hispanic women made just 53 cents for every dollar earned by a White man (down from 54.4 cents in 2016) and Black women made just 60.8 cents (down from 62.5 cents in 2016). At $32,002 per year of full-time work, median earnings for Hispanic women are below the qualifying income threshold for eligibility for food stamps for a family of four.

“Closing the wage gap is not a zero-sum game—gains for one gender do not require losses for the other,” the IWPR points out in a fact sheet on the pay gap. While the gender gap has narrowed over the past several decades, wage stagnation in the US is an ongoing concern for men and women alike:

Unemployment held steady at 3.9 percent last month, while the US economy added 201,000 jobs, according to the August jobs report from the US Bureau of Labor statistics, released on Friday. The numbers of new jobs created in the previous two months were revised downward, however, by 248,000 to 208,000 for June and from 157,000 to 147,000 fro July—a total downward revision of 50,000.

Average hourly earnings rose by 10 cents to $27.16 in August, for a year-over-year gain of 77 cents or 2.9 percent. These numbers indicate that wage growth in the US may finally be accelerating again after years of stagnation despite a tight labor market, the New York Times reported:

Amy Glaser, a senior vice president at the staffing company Adecco, said she had noticed a significant change in employers’ willingness to increase hourly wages. “Now clients are talking in terms of dollars instead of cents for wage increases,” she said. During the busy holiday season, employees often jump from one business to another for an additional 50 cents an hour, Ms. Glaser said. Companies are trying to head off that exodus, she said, by starting seasonal hiring earlier — in August, instead of September and October — and by offering higher starting pay.

One sour note in Friday’s report, however, was that both the labor force participation rate and the employment-population ratio declined by 0.2 percentage points, to 62.7 percent and 60.3 percent, respectively. These figures suggest “an economy running awfully close to its capacity,” Neil Irwin observes at the Times’ Upshot blog:

Competitive total rewards packages are a key battleground in the scramble for talent today. Yet many organizations still rely on outdated approaches when communicating rewards through the hiring process, focusing too much on compensation while neglecting benefits. This is becoming more difficult as salary budgets continue to stagnate: Recent salary surveys suggest that cash wages in the US are unlikely to grow much faster in the coming year than they have in 2018, despite a strong economy and a tight labor market.

To better understand how employers can use their benefit offerings as talent attractors, Gartner’s Total Rewards team worked with data from our talent market intelligence portal TalentNeuron, looking for a connection between how organizations pitch their benefits in job postings and how quickly they are able to fill posted roles. Organizations that don’t leverage their benefits offerings in this way, we found, may be missing out on an opportunity to meaningfully boost their appeal to candidates.

Despite historically low levels of unemployment and high demand for labor, salary budget surveys for 2018-2019 suggest that US wages will grow on average by just about 3 percent both this year and next year, continuing a trend of lackluster raises despite labor market conditions that theoretically should push earnings higher. The WorldatWork 2018-2019 Salary Budget Survey projects a mean average wage growth of 3.2 percent and a median 0f 3.0 percent next year, little changed from 3.1 percent (mean) and 3.0 percent (median) in 2018.

Some 85 percent of U.S. employers gave out performance-based bonuses or other forms of variable incentive pay in 2018, the survey shows, and the amount of variable pay budgeted and paid out, for all employee categories, has been stable for several years. When total rewards professionals were asked about their variable pay budgets for 2019, their responses were virtually unchanged from the amounts budgeted for this year and … for 2017.

Alison Avalos, director of membership and total rewards strategy at WorldatWork, tells Miller that one reason why these budgets aren’t increasing is that employers are increasingly using benefits to attract and retain talent instead of cash rewards, including intangible benefits like professional development opportunities and purpose-driven organizational cultures that align with employees’ personal values.

Similarly, Willis Towers Watson’s 2018 General Industry Salary Budget Survey finds that US professionals can expect raises of 3.1 percent on average next year, compared to 3.0 percent this year. Wage growth has leveled off at around 3 percent per year over the past decade. Their survey also found that star performers would once again see higher increases next year, and registered a slight increase in budgets for discretionary bonuses:

The latest labor market bulletin from the UK Office for National Statistics, released on Tuesday, shows that the number of citizens of other EU countries working in the UK has declined in the past year by the largest amount since the government began collecting comparable records two decades ago. Between April and June 2018, approximately 2.28 million EU nationals were employed in the country: 86,000 fewer than in the second quarter of 2017. In the same period, the number of employed UK nationals increased by 332,000 to 28.76 million, while the number of non-EU foreign workers increased by 74,000 to 1.27 million.

“Today’s figures confirm that the UK labour market has suffered from a ‘supply shock’ of fewer EU-born workers coming to live and work in the UK during the past year, compared with previous years. This has contributed to labour supply failing to keep pace with the strong demand for workers; which is consistent with another welcome fall in unemployment.” …

“The tightening labour market is putting modest upward pressure on pay, but this still isn’t leading to more widespread pressure due to ongoing weak productivity,” said Davies.

New employer survey data released on Monday by the CIPD and the recruitment firm Adecco showed that UK employers were experiencing staff shortages due to the low-unemployment environment and a decline in migration from the EU. The survey found that the number of applicants per vacancy had dropped across all roles since last summer, while 66 percent of employers said at least some of their vacancies were proving difficult to fill.

Unemployment increased from 3.8 to 4.0 percent as the number of unemployed persons increased by 499,000 to 6.6 million, but these changes reflected the large numbers of new job seekers, not people being thrown out of work. The bureau also revised its estimates for job growth upward for the previous two months, from 233,000 to 244,000 new jobs in May and from 159,000 to 175,000 in April.

Wage growth remains lower than in previous expansionary periods, with June’s earnings numbers showing a year-over-year increase of just 2.7 percent. Average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose by 5 cents to $26.98 last month. Coming after a long period of wage stagnation, these numbers are better than nothing for American workers, but still below economists’ expectations and barely enough to keep pace with inflation.

It’s easy to imagine people who have become disengaged from the work force who, in this tightening job market, are more likely than they were a few years ago to see help wanted signs everywhere, or to have friends and acquaintances urge them to start working.